The Black Stone Paradox
by La Guera
Summary: Sam Winchester had his first experience with a paradox at seven.  He's twentyfour now, and about to discover another.


Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events herein are property of Eric Kripke, Robert Singer, and the CW. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.

**A/N: **Spoilers for S2. Does not include "canon" from the graphic novel series.

It's a perverse irony considering that he lives his life in the dark and calls the flat, black hours after midnight dawn, but Sam Winchester has always been drawn to shiny things. They catch his eye and hold him in thrall, and sometimes, he reaches for them even when he knows he shouldn't, knows they'll burn and cut to the bone. His mother must've sensed the predilection in him on those long nights when he'd suckled at her breast, because in every picture of himself that he's ever seen, he's wearing bright colors. Yellow and powder blue, sunshine and blue, Kansas cornfield sky.

Dad, for all his blockheaded stubbornness, must've sensed it, too, because he'd gotten him a rock polisher for his fourth birthday, and to this day, Sam can't think of any reason why John Winchester, Marine and salt-of-the-earth greasemonkey, would've bought such a Mr. Wizard gift. Not when his previous gifts had been baseball gloves and soccer balls and stuffed dinosaurs with improbably hued hides. Even Dean, high on cake frosting, had looked at it askance, and Bobby, slouched in a folding chair and sipping rum-spiked Hawaiian punch from a plastic cup, had blinked at it, belched softly, and said, "What the hell is that, John?" Dad had looked away and shrugged, and Bobby'd grunted and shaken his head.

Now that he thinks about it, Sam wonders where Dad had found a rock polisher in the first place. The army surplus stores and thrift shops that had served as their one-stop shops had never sold them, and he doesn't remember asking for one. Of course, if he's honest with himself, he doesn't remember much of his childhood. He's walled it up, covered it with the thick, important paper of high school diplomas and the undergraduate degree from Stanford that is half a semester and forever beyond his grasp. The smells of heavy paper and adhesive had covered up the stink of sulfur, or maybe they'd mimicked it so well that he hadn't noticed the difference. Either way, he'd forgotten, and he'd liked it that way.

What he does remember is sitting crosslegged on the floor and turning the heavy, plastic hand crank to hear the gears and grinders rumble. He'd driven Dean bugshit that summer-even at four, he'd known better than to ask Dad, who was nose-deep in demon-lore and crazy with revenge-dragging him from the comfortable hypnosis of cartoons on the black-and-white TV to the shimmering heat of Bobby's junkyard. There was a gravel pit there. Broken oyster shells and smooth, white limestone, mostly, but there were occasional glitters of mica and quartz. He'd kicked aside crushed beer cans and skirted the cruel witch's nails of broken Budweiser bottles, gathering his prospective treasures in his grubby hands and the pockets of his jeans.

When he'd stuffed his pockets and fists to bulging, he'd lumber to the cool shade of Bobby's garage, which smelled exotically of oil and acid and rusting car guts. He'd sit in the yawning doorway and listen to the tin roof ping and pop in furtive Morse code while he lined up his rocks. Sometimes, Bobby's old mutts came to sniff and lick at the stones, and he'd shooed them away with impatient pats. They never minded and sniffed his hair instead, and when they wearied of the smell of boy-sweat, they stretched beneath the cars and chewed fleas with leisurely pique.

He'd tried to polish the rocks himself, but his arm had been too young for the task, and so he'd whined at Dean until he'd abandoned his gleeful inspection of car gullets and sat beside him in the doorway. Dean had polished them all. He'd often worked with ill grace, but he'd done it, a dirty-necked organ grinder beset by a monkey with shining brown eyes and a mop of untidy brown hair.

"Grind that'un more, Dean," he'd exhorted him, sure that if Dean turned the crank just a little longer, a gritty quarry rock would suddenly glow with its own light.

"I don't wanna polish this stupid rock, Sammy," Dean'd reply, and roll his eyes, but his arm would keep cranking anyway.

The rocks had never looked as beautiful as he had thought they would. The limestones had been smooth and shiny, but they had held no light; they'd only reflected, tiny moons stealing the faraway fire of the sun. The mica and quartz had fared better, and for a while, he'd pretended they were diamonds, baubles fit for the princess waiting at the end of Daddy's endless rainbow.

Not long after he'd gotten the polisher, he'd run into the house with quartz and mica beauty in his hands and thrust it beneath his father's nose as he read the pages of a book that smelled of leather and age.

"Look, Daddy," he'd cried. "They're for the princess at the end of the rainbow."

Dad's face had blanched and gone all funny, and Dean, who'd barreled into the house after him, had frozen in the doorway, one foot on the crumbling, stucco threshold and one grimy hand splayed and tented on the tired mesh of the screen door. Sammy'd gazed into his father's pinched face, suddenly afraid that he'd done something wrong.

"Those're real nice, Sammy," Dad had managed at last. "Why don't you go put 'em in your room?" He'd ruffled his hair and gone into the kitchen, and when he'd come back, he'd had a tumbler of whiskey in one hand.

So Sam had, arranged them on the dresser he'd shared with Dean. Dean'd bitched that having polished rocks in front of his plastic soldiers made them look like pansies, but he'd never taken them off. Sam had done that himself when he'd realized that rock candy gave off the same light if you left it in the sun. His treasures had been as worthless as hard sugar, and he'd snatched them from their place of honor and tossed them into the drainage ditch in front of Bobby's house the summer he turned six.

He'd kept the rock polisher, though. Somehow, he couldn't bear to give it up even if all it made were pretty lies, and the summer after the quartz collection had gone into the ditch, he'd found the magic rock.

It hadn't come from Bobby's gravel pit; that'd been left behind the summer before. They'd been holed up in Yuma this time, where home was a cramped hotel room and a balanced dinner was a beef and bean burrito from the gas station across the street. Dad had gone out to test the local wind for rumors of a skinwalker, and though he wasn't supposed to leave the room when Dad was out, Sam had slipped into the parking lot to scuff his shoes on the warm, black macadam and walk the broken, yellow tightrope of stone parking barriers.

The rock had been beside the balding rear tire of an avocado-green Cadilac the size of a small whaler. He'd thought it was a lump of coal at first, or maybe a prehistoric dog turd, but then a fading ray of early-evening sunshine had made it wink. He'd hopped off the teetering parking barrier and gone to squat over the mysterious rock, a hunter examining the spoor of a dangerous and rare beast.

He'd prodded the stone with his finger, careful to avoid the squashed cigarette butt that had smeared on the blacktop like a crushed bug. The rock had been warm and porous, and he'd smiled at the rough texture. It'd occurred to him that maybe it was a piece of charcoal left behind by a tourist on the way to the Grand Canyon, and he'd picked it up and pounded it against the scarred surface of the parking lot. The stone had remained intact, and when he'd turned it in his hand, a small, black speck had gleamed invitingly at him.

He'd still been hunkered beside the Caddy when Dean'd found him.

"Sam, what the hell are you doin' out here?" he'd demanded, hair tousled and eyes bleary from an afternoon nap. "If Dad catches you out here, he'll have your ass."

"You're not s'posed to say that, Dean," he'd said, but he'd been too fascinated by the gleaming, black speck on the otherwise dull surface of the rock to care.

Dean had been unfazed. He could afford bravado when Dad was out of sight. "So? He can't punish what he didn't catch. 'Sides, he says that and worse all the time. If I can kill stuff like Dad, why can't I talk like him, too?" Sullen and puzzled, but Sam'd known that by the time Dad returned from the local pool hall with smoke on his clothes and liquid camaraderie on his breath, it'd be "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" and unblinking obedience.

Sam'd thrust the stone into Dean's face. "Lookit what I found."

Dean'd squinted at the rock and batted Sam's hand away. "It's just a dumb rock."

"Nuh uh. Look. It's shiny."

Another indifferent squint at the rock. "Who cares? Whatever it is, you're gonna get your a-butt kicked if Dad catches you out here, and I'm not taking a whippin' 'cause of you. Now come on."

Sam had allowed himself to be herded into the dingy room smudged with nicotine light, and the minute Dean had bolted the door behind them, he'd run to his duffel bag and pulled out the rock polisher. It'd been on its last gear by then, more gum than steel teeth. Toy maintenance had often fallen by the wayside in favor of gun maintenance.

Dean, sitting on one of the beds with one foot over his knee to pick the lint and grit from his socks, had looked up at the hopeful rustle of shifting canvas and grimaced. "Not that stupid thing, Sammy."

"Please, Dean?"

"No. It's just a stupid rock."

"This one's different, Dean, I know it."

"That's what you said about all the rocks before." But he'd slithered from the bed, and like he'd done so many times before and since, he'd taken the rock polisher from his hand and settled on the floor, skinny back propped against the bed.

He'd turned the crank with bored familiarity and swatted him back when curiosity made him breathe on his neck. The polisher had growled and chewed, and at first, he'd been afraid that Dean was right, that the rock was as dead and lightless as the rest. Then Dean's cranking arm had sputtered to a halt, and he'd sat forward abruptly.

"Woah."

Sam had peered over his shoulder and grinned. "Told you."

The rough, black stone had begun to gleam, a sliver of midnight glass covered in tar. It had been bright and smooth, and he'd known that if he could touch it, it would be as cold as starlight.

"More, Dean," he'd urged, and the polisher had spun into motion again.

_It makes its own light, _he'd thought feverishly as the stone had clattered and tumbled endlessly beneath the polisher. _I saw it, and Dean saw it, too._

Dean had worked the crank until he was exhausted, until he shuddered and panted and blushed with exertion. Then he'd stopped and swiped his forearm across his sweaty forehead.

"No more, Samster the Hamster," he'd declared breathlessly, and let his arm droop bonelessly to his side. Even then, Dean had had a flair for the dramatic.

The stone had lain in the dirty gullet of the polisher, an egg left to rot in an abandoned nest, and Sam had stared at in tremulous wonder. It was small and almost perfectly round, and Dean had polished it until it burned black flame. It wasn't like the mica and quartz he had fished from Bobby's sad beer-can quarry, a holder of reflected or captured light. The light came from the darkness, a dark glow that pulsed and flickered.

He had plucked the stone from the basin and studied it as it lay in his palm, cool and liquid black, oil and black glass. It had been lighter than he had expected, and this had secretly delighted him.

"It's a magic stone, Dean," he'd breathed, and knowing what he knows now, he wonders how Dean had managed not to laugh in his face and crown him King Dork.

But Dean had only shaken his head and said, "Yeah, Sammy, it is." Dean had been gentler then-_life_ had been gentler then-and he could still afford the innocent lies of childhood.

Sam had never shown the stone to Dad; he doesn't know why. Dad would never have taken it. He'd never taken the mica stones, no matter how useless they'd been. But he'd been afraid. Dad was a soldier, and for all his belief in demons and devils, he'd never put store in the hopeful magic of make-believe. Magic was a tool to be feared and used only when necessary, not a sweet dream to hide behind hearts and tongues. Dad might not've taken the stone, but he would've taken the magic, excised it with the cruel, practical efficiency of a paring knife. Dad would've made the stone worthless, snuffed the light with the wet blanket of fact.

Science would do that for him later, of course, courtesy of sixth-grade earth science, but back then, make-believe had still mattered. He'd needed it, and so he'd kept the stone a secret, tucked it into the inside pocket of his duffel bag. And Dean, who always knew the way the wind had blown in Sam's world, had never breathed a word. Not even in the heat of the most savage sibling brawl, when the most well-guarded secrets of boyhood had been laid bare in the name of one-upmanship.

Sometimes, when Dad had been gone on particularly long hunts, Dean had polished the stone for him, had stoked the bright fire that had so fascinated him. Sam had never had to ask; he would simply find Dean cross-legged on the floor with the rock polisher in his lap. Round and round the stone would go, and Dean would apply himself to the task with the same earnest, thin-lipped concentration that overtook him when he was charged with cleaning the guns and crossbows. When he was done, he would drop the stone into Sam's upturned palm and ruffle his hair, and that night, Sam would lie under the thin tent of his blanket and gaze at the light inside the sliver of darkness in his hand.

Sometimes, he'd seen things in the flat, black pool of light, glimpses of possible futures. Astronauts or racecar drivers, Sam behind the wheel and Dean with greased wrench in hand. Veterinarians. Policemen. Firefighters or cowboys on the open plain. The stone had been his first taste of hope, and he'd guarded it jealously.

It had also, he notes now as his fingers tighten convulsively around the smooth, black leather of the Impala's steering wheel, been his first brush with the paradox. Light from darkness. Glass from rough, porous stone. The first paradox, but not the last.

He's discovered another since then, stared into its ugly, mottled face over and over again no matter how hard and far he runs. He loves beautiful things and is attracted to the beckoning gleam of hope on the horizon, but he destroys them. His love corrupts. Everything he touches crumbles in his fingers. He holds them too tightly, fractures and strangles and crushes. His love is poison, the withering shadow that blights what it cherishes. He's a magpie with the Devil's eye.

_And it's yellow, _he thinks.

He realizes as he drives down the highway with Dean slumped in the backseat and nodding to the rhythm of the wheels that he's always been the rainmaker, the destroyer. Mom was the first, burned to ash on the roof of his nursery while he screamed in his crib. She'd died because she'd given him life. If she'd had anyone else, a girl, maybe, or a boy named John Jr., she might still be alive, cooking pot pies in her Kansas dream house and waiting for Dad to come in from the body shop, grease beneath his nails and love on his mind. Maybe there'd be four whole Winchesters instead of two halves of a whole that never was.

And then there's Jess, of course, his California goddess burned on the pyre of his worship. He'd known better, known that it was dangerous to draw anyone into his circle. Dad and Dean had said so a thousand times, but his blood had been hot with defiance, and from the lofty perch of distance, he'd dismissed Dean as Dad's parrot, the good little soldier who had no thoughts or will of his own. Besides, Stanford had been an oasis, the Eden Milton had extolled so lavishly in _Paradise Lost_, and it had been guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. Evil had been forbidden to walk its paths.

It's laughable now, how smug he'd been, how superior, so sure that he was safe. As if sunshine and palm trees were enough to keep the wolves out. But it'd been so damn easy to believe that when he was stretched out on the green with a criminology book on his lap and the sun on his face. The grass had been so green, like the rolling, Technicolor hills of the Emerald City in _The Wizard of Oz._ He'd been rocked in the lulling cradle of routine, of stone walls and whiteboards and the dry order of biological classification systems, and then he'd met Jess his sophomore year, and his life there had seemed preordained.

Sometimes, the longing for Stanford and what could've been is a dull ache in his belly, a hunger for sweetness he'll never taste again. He misses the alternating monotony of the Tuesday-Thursday schedule and the Monday-Wednesday-Friday waltz from one side of campus to the other. He misses the pressure that he knows will end when the exam does, and the fevered rush of skating on the edge of a disaster he knows he can control.

But mostly he misses the townhouse he rented with Jess, the smell of her when she was fresh out of the shower and nestled in the crook of his arm beneath rumpled bedsheets. He misses the prospect of the Mayberry life he had planned, with the white picket fence and the business cards embossed with the words, _Samuel Winchester, Esq. _He misses the sanity, and, quite frankly, the chance to tell Dad, "I told you so."

Turns out that the old man and Dean had been right all along. The family business had found him out, after all, and the mundane existence he'd been so proud of had gone up in a billow of smoke and screaming, immolating girlfriend. It'd been so damn Oedipal, his girlfriend becoming his mother in the last, tortured seconds of her life, and from somewhere deep within the analytical brain that had served him so well in college and gotten him courted by the top law schools, he'd thought of how pleased Freud would be to be right. He's never admitted that lunatic thought to anyone, not even Dean, but he pays for it every night by watching her burn behind his closed eyelids.

He's become morbid since his unscheduled family reunion, or maybe he's just picked up old habits he'd prefer to forget. Anyway, he wonders where she'd be now if she hadn't crossed his path and fallen hard for his soulful brown eyes and self-effacing charm. Certainly not in a tidy pile of ash inside her tasteful, cherry-walnut coffin. She'd been as bright as she'd been beautiful, and her possibilities as an organic chemist had been limitless until his hand had closed around hers and snuffed them. If she'd escaped his covetous, grasping shadow, maybe she would've cured the lame and healed the sick.

But those maybes are all gone. Just like her.

And just like Dad, though he admits that's one he never saw coming. He'd assumed his dad would live forever, defeat the Demon by dint of simple attrition. The Devil was eternal, but so was John Winchester. His few friends had agreed on that if they could agree on nothing else. And yet, John Winchester is gone, taken twice over. First as a trade for Dean's life-a trade now moot, and isn't that a cruel joke?-and then as a sacrifice for him. That one had counted, at least, but he's not sure for how much. Not when Dean had to make the same sacrifice just to let him go on breathing in this life he can't stand.

Dad's his fault, too, he knows, another casualty of his need to possess the forbidden and unattainable. Dad had warned them not to seek him out, not to follow him, but Sam had insisted. He'd been accustomed to getting his way since childhood, and when Dean had turned up on his doorstep after four years, he'd wanted nothing more than to see Dad's face and reassure himself that the unbreakable remained unbroken. He'd unwittingly driven his father into the jaws of the beast.

His stubbornness and arrogance had been the catalyst for everything that had come after. If he'd but listened, maybe Dad would still be out there, rambling the dusty back roads in pursuit of his white whale. Meg might never have been a tool to be used and discarded when her body was broken, and Ava would still be planning her wedding in Peoria. And Madison wouldn't be an unsolved homicide in San Francisco.

_If you're going to San Francisco, wear some flowers in your hair, _croons Roy Orbison inside his head, and Sam adds helplessly, _And throw in some wolfsbane and aconite. _He's sure he'll never set foot in San Francisco again if he can help it.

His heart hurts when he thinks of Madison because she had been collateral damage. Sure, she was a dark creature, and once a month, she'd lunged in the chafing, silver binds of the moonlight and torn the throats and guts from innocent people, but for twenty-nine days out of thirty, she'd been just another girl in the big city, loving and fearing and kissing instead of killing. She'd been soft beneath his hands and ardent beneath his rocking body, and there had nothing but cool clarity and warm gratitude in her eyes in the instant before he'd squeezed the trigger and extinguished the light in them forever.

He tries to tell himself that he did her a mercy. Odds were that if he and Dean hadn't found her, then someone like Gordon Walker would've, and they would've shown her no kindness. They'd have relished the kill, in fact, maybe even have drawn it out to a sadistic pleasure and gotten off on it later over beers in some ramshackle hunters' honky tonk. They most certainly wouldn't have shed tears and covered her face before they slipped out of the apartment so they wouldn't have to meet her blind, clouding gaze or look at her brains drying around her head in a grisly corona.

He can still remember Dean cleaning their fingerprints from the apartment, face averted so that Sam wouldn't ask questions about his red-rimmed eyes. He's never loved Dean more than he did in that moment, when he crouched and picked up the gun and cleaned it of Sam's fingerprints without a word. When he'd done his best to wash Sam's hands of the blood that stained them.

It hadn't worked. Nothing could change the simple truth that Madison had been the second girl to die because of him, because of his selfishness and his incompetence. Jess because she'd been denied the dignity of truth and choice, and Madison because she'd believed in him too much. She'd thought that he could save her, and in the end, the only salvation he could offer had been a .45 between the eyes.

He wonders where they've gone, all the casualties of his love and hubris. He suspects that they're together, milling in the afterlife and swapping stories about how contact with Sam Winchester changed them. Jess is there, beautiful in a white gown, flecks of ash in her hair. Mom and Madison, too. Mom carries scorch marks like a Caesarian scar, and Madison has the red dot of an Indian wife on her forehead. Dad sits in a rickety folding chair at the head of a wooden picnic table, afforded the place of honor because he died for both of his sons.

There's one more place at the table, though, and it's for Dean. Mom had been his first victim, but Dean has been his longest. He's been breaking Dean for as long as he's drawn breath, grinding him down like a rock in a crusher. Or a polisher. The hours Dean spent cranking the handle of that rock polisher have taken a terrible, symbolic weight in his mind. Dean had been unspooling the course of his own life with every turn of the crank, and neither of them had known it.

It seems so obvious now, and Sam knows only willful blindness could've missed it. Dean had shared everything with him when they were kids, right down to his bed, and he'd made the sacrifices without a whimper, gone with nothing so Sam could have everything, and Sam'd accepted it as his due. He'd left Dean behind without so much as a backward glance and spent four years sneering down his Stanford-sharpened nose at his rube brother, so sure that he would be better.

Except Dean is better, and always has been. Because even after all that Sam's done, Dean still forfeited his soul for him without looking back. Sam wasn't there, but he knows that Dean never hesitated. He never has. Not when it comes to him. Hell, he'd been the one to drive Sam to the bus station when he'd spit in their faces and lit for Stanford. He'd driven him with the knife sticking out of his back and never said a word about how much it hurt. Because it was what Sam had wanted.

It won't be long before Dean breaks. A glance in the rearview, and Sam can see the lines in Dean's face as he sleeps, the spidery, stealthy fault lines of imminent collapse. He's been sleeping a lot lately, too much, and part of Sam wonders if it's a consequence of selling his soul, a sign that the transference of ownership has already begun. Maybe Dean's fought for him so long that he doesn't have the strength to fight for himself, or maybe he just doesn't think there's anything worth fighting for.

He thinks of Dean and of the empty chair and of the stone he'd polished so diligently for him for all those years, until the polisher had broken in the winter of '93. The stone had broken, too, split down the middle in the bottom of his duffel. He'd found it while he was unpacking in his dorm room, and he'd stared at it for a very long time, his throat an inexplicable knot. Maybe it had simply grown brittle from so much polishing, or maybe it had been a victim of careless handling. There'd been a lot of that going around, and from the looks of things, that much at least is unchanged.

Dean's face, thin beneath the skin. Thin enough to break. Sam thinks of the empty chair at the wooden picnic table and floors the accelerator. The Impala has been faithful to Dean even when Sam hasn't, and it runs hard for him, roars down the road in a bid to outrun the hour that draws very, very nigh.

Sam has one year to make this right, one year to ensure that Dean isn't just another broken bauble in his charnel house of shiny things that have lost their luster at his touch. He tightens his grip on the wheel and steadfastly ignores the urge to check his watch.

In the backseat of the Impala, beneath Dean's feet, two halves of a black stone rattle and click in the bottom of Sam's duffel bag.


End file.
